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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

We need to stop pretending that Russia is anywhere near as strong as East Germany + Ukraine + rest of Soviet Union.

This here proves that Russians cannot make chips on their own. The loss of East Germany and other high tech sectors of the former union is grossly apparent.

EDIT: if Russia were any stronger than they really are, they'd build their own chips. Rather than try to avoid sanctions to purchase our $1 low-tech mass produced chips. The fact that they've stopped so low as to rely upon burglary of others is our advantage. It means we can slow down and hamper their efforts.

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But, Russia does make their own chips, which they use for things like radar transmitters and radar ASICs. They don't make these commodity grade chips because, well, they're commodities, and their fabs are better used for higher-end/more custom applications.

It's true that Russia isn't the USSR. At the same time, it's not the economic backwater people said it is; it's got fairly developed industry.

Intel Altera and AMD Xilinx chips are clearly better than the Russian ASICs, as per the article. We can see them stealing our chips and figure out where the Russian capabilities are.

STM32 is particularly hilarious to me. I mean, they are good chips but they aren't exactly high tech. STM32 is a thing I expected Russia to be able to produce domestically. But apparently now the cats out of the bag. Clearly the Russian semiconductor industry is in a hilariously bad state.

Altera and Xilinx make FPGAs, not ASICs. They are two fundamentally different kinds of chips.

Why would Russia invest tens of millions of dollars on making its own series of 5 cent microprocessors when it can just import cheap commodity STM32 chips? There is no point in manufacturing them, it's simply not a smart way of spending money.

If you don't believe Russia can fab their own chips, you can just go on eBay and buy an Elbrus system, or something. They can. They have the capability to produce basic chips, and you can buy them. I don't understand why them doing the smart thing and saving hundreds of millions to billions of dollars by not reinventing the wheel and redesigning every category of commodity chip is proof they can't, especially when you can literally go out and buy Russian made chips.

> Altera and Xilinx make FPGAs, not ASICs. They are two fundamentally different kinds of chips.

But FPGAs can replace ASICs especially with regards to RADAR / signal processing. Its clear that they prefer these Xilinx / Altera chips, because they're bothering to try to black-market import these chips and avoid sanctions.

> Why would Russia invest tens of millions of dollars on making its own series of 5 cent microprocessors when it can just import cheap commodity STM32 chips? There is no point in manufacturing them, it's simply not a smart way of spending money.

Because we have laws (that should be better enforced) such that Russia isn't supposed to be getting those chips right now. Starve Russia of those chips.

As I've said before, the sanctions are fundamentally unenforceable for commodity chips, and the Russians know this.

While FPGAs can replace ASICs for some tasks, that's not true for all of them, and for many it will be worse in the end. But sure, anyways Russia can't go lower than 65nm so it can't make great FPGAs no matter what.

Russia does build it's own chips but their fab tech is about 15 years behind the state of the art. The Asianometry YouTube channel has some details on Russia's own chips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_4R4X7AWtU

While they build their own chips, the video looks at why Russia can't replace TSMC for all of domestic use. But I suspect the whole local industry is oriented towards the war machine. I doubt you need 3nm chips for missiles.

Look at the war-chips discussed here.

STM32. That means we are talking about 40nm or older chips that Russia is stealing from us.

Yeah, we need to work better securing our border/customs. But we also can take a step back and laugh at the fact that they are stealing our low cost commodity low-tech chips.

I agree with you about borders and customs. However, I don't find war a laughing matter. Lots of people are dying. War is about supply chain and scale. Higher tech, but lower yield chips would not be good for a war machine. You want simplicity and scale. You don't actually want the latest technology, but robust older, predictable technology. I guess we can laugh that they can't even produce it domestically.

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ammunition-manufactur...

The Soviet and now Russian approach to war is logistics, math. They use a lot of modelling in their strategy. Its clear they are not having too many logistic problems despite sanctions if they can produce so much. And that is worrying.

When supply lines were cut in Kherson by Ukraine, Russia pulled back. If Ukraine wants to win, they need to target supply lines and production capacity. They can target supply lines, but production capacity seems so far out of reach.

I guess the fact that neither party has officially declared war on each other means targeting production will remain out of reach. You read that right, neither Ukraine or Russia had officially declared war.

Russia isn't producing these STM32 chips. They're getting imported through Taiwan.

That means we can stop the production of Russian drones by just being more careful about STM32 exports. No need to bomb or explode anything.

NXP chips as well: that's being imported through Europe.

Intel Altera chips likely came from Arizona, Texas, Utah, or maybe Israel. There's only so many places those chips are made.

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How did a chip made in (probably) Arizona get into a Russian drone that killed Ukrainians? That's what this story is about. (In the case of Intel/Altera FPGAs). There's tons-and-tons of chips that have come from various USA (Intel Altera FPGA), European (NXP), Korean, or Taiwanese (TSMC makes STM32 IIRC) fabrication facilities.

Russia is importing them because Russia either has no capability to make these chips at home, or has decided that importing them is cheaper/easier. That's their weakness, its something we can cut-off if we tightened up customs a bit.

You are absolutely right. My guess is older high volume chips are harder to control.

We can stop it but how long will it take to dwindle their supplies?

If these drones use one per drone and you can buy thousands of these chips easily, they've got a lot of drones to be built before their own supply runs out

Then we do this in preparation of the next war.

Iran (Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthis), North Korea, etc. etc. There's plenty of groups around the world who do _NOT_ have the capabilities to build chips who will 100% copy Russia's strategy here.

We need to keep these chips out of their hands too. Even if its "too late" to stop it for Russia-Ukraine, its not too late to stop it in say... I dunno... China vs Taiwan scenario in a few years.

Better to get started on this today rather than complaining about it again 5 years from now when the _NEXT_ inevitable group starts stealing our chips to build their munitions.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good here. Regardless of the future, we will be happier as a country to have this figured out today, rather than delaying this another few years.

On the other hand, if they have fabd creating more sophisticated chips, why would they also create old tech when they can just buy it? Just because they're using STM32's doesn't mean their fab tech is worse. It means the cost of making their own 40mm chips right now is more than the cost of importing them.

This is silly. No one can "make chips on their own" except for China/Taiwan. Even the US would be limited to manufacturing small quantities for military/research purposes that are several generations behind the state of the art. Consumer electronics would become a scarce commodity very quickly.

Seems weird to include SMIC and not Samsung or Intel. Those two are behind TSMC, sure, but not so far behind that it's sensible to leave their facilities off the map of "makes chips on their own". They're not GloFo.

FYI, this is the STM named in the title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STMicroelectronics

They can't make newest-generation chips for a flagship smartphone, but simpler devices are likely going to be fine.

USA's TI and GloFo and Micron/Crucial are all making our own chips.

I'm not talking 3nm top-of-the-line stuff (though Intel / Arizona is close to that). I'm talking about our 50-cent voltage regulator chips that's seemingly outside the ability for Russia to make (As Russia is clearly taking Ti chips from us somehow).

It's hilariously sad to see them struggle with sourcing such low levels of technology. This is decades old 180nm or older chips here.

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China is far far ahead, at least at EUV, likely under 10nm these days.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikron_Group

This is incorrect - Russia does have domestic 180mm, 90nm, and 65nm fabs. You can even buy chips made at those fabs.

Ultimately it's cheaper to import a 50cent TI DAC (or a clone from China) than go through the entire design pipeline for your own. The rational choice is to import commodity grade chips (which can't be sanctioned anyways) and leave the domestic fabs to more sensitive things like radars, EW systems, etc... That require custom silicon.

Well sure. But if Russia has initiated effectively a war against an allied nation, and we see the missiles Russia shoot into Ukraine contains these commodity chips... we need to have a discussion with customs.

We can see that Russia prefers to import these $1 or cheaper chips, rather than build their own.

It's not possible to stop them. These chips are literally commodities - some of them are actually technically counterfeit and you might never notice. The Russians will buy them from second hand markets, just like everyone else. They're just too cheap and too common for sanctions to be enforceable.

The point isn't to make things perfectly tight. Its to make Russia work harder to penetrate our defenses and increase the costs for them.

Every black market trick they do to penetrate customs to get these chips is another trick we can track and close down. Its ongoing work, but likely important for other wars that have yet to come (see China, who might pull the same crap if they start anything with Taiwan).

It's not a question of customs. These chips are commodities and they can be bought by the thousands from, say, China - they aren't generally made or finished in the US either. US customs don't have a say in this.

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